O'Reilly's Ben Lorica slices and dices current app trends for iPhone and Android (nice data points on price stabilization too): "While it might be true that the number of Book apps is growing at a faster rate, Games continue to dominate the list of popular U.S. iTunes Apps. Games accounted for about a fifth of all iTunes apps over the…

One of my favorite sources of interesting reading material these days is Hacker News (follow them at @newsycombinator), and this week they pointed me to a piece from Derek Sivers that applies to many of the emerging digital and mobile markets for media: He kept saying, "If only one percent of the people reading this magazine buy my CD……

Last week we released 16 of our books as iPhone Apps (and on Saturday added The Twitter Book), and there's some interesting Long Tail data coming in. We've seen Long Tail behavior in the data from Safari Books Online and from Google Book Search, though in this case it's about geography: even though regions like Colombia, Belgium, and Greece are…

Over on Teleread, Chris Meadows has a nice review of our iPhone Missing Manual app, which echoes several other reviewers (and my own personal experience with the app): How helpful is the book? I have already found a lot of remarkably useful information just in the space of a few chapters. It would be no exaggeration to say I…

We released David Pogue's iPhone: The Missing Manual as an iPhone App on Friday, and by Saturday it was already the #2 for-pay App in the Books category on iTunes (where it has remained, behind only the Classics App), and it continues to gain ground. In just four days, it has become one of our top sellers of the year…

Amazon's new iPhone application has an experimental feature, dubbed Amazon Remembers, that blends product discovery and crowdsourcing. From the New York Times Bits blog: The tool lets users take a photograph of any product they see in the real world. The photos are then uploaded to Amazon and turned over to the far-flung freelance workers in Amazon's Mechanical Turk program,…

Ebooks as iPhone applications started as a novelty/workaround, but the technique is now being used by Houghton Mifflin for a full-fledged digital rollout. From Wired's Epicenter blog: The publisher recently partnered with a design and development company called ScrollMotion to launch a series of bestselling in-copyright e-books for the iPhone where each title is its own app and a…

Hugh McGuire is loving Stanza, the free ereader app for the iPhone/iPod Touch. From the Book Oven Blog: 40,000 ebook dowloads-a-day. I've got 35 of them sitting on my iPod. If you are a publisher, think long and hard about that number. The reason I have 35 books downloaded onto my Stanza is: a) it is easy, b) it…